Commission Panel

Julia is the Director of Policy, Performance and Communications at Westminster City Council. Her team works across policy, research, business intelligence, members services, change management, behaviour change, evaluation and digital communications to provide the Council with a powerful blend of skills and experience, capable of creating policies and behaviour change strategies that can help the council change lives for the better, even in the most taxing of times.

Julia has worked for the City Council since 2000 and has developed a sector leading campaigning methodology that combines a scientific approach with creative implementation. She is a leading practitioner in commercialising council services and assets and a founding director of Westco Trading Ltd.

Rory is Vice Chairman, an attractively vague job title which has allowed him to co-found Ogilvychange, a behavioral science practice.

Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for “butterfly effects” in consumer behavior – these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make – for instance tripling the sales rate of a call centre by adding just a few sentences to the script. Put another way, lots of agencies will talk about”bought, owned and earned” media: we also look for “invented media” and “discovered media”: seeking out those unexpected (and inexpensive) nudges that transform the way that people think and act.

Before founding Ogilvychange, Rory was a copywriter and creative director at Ogilvy for over 20 years, having joined as a graduate trainee in 1988. He has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, and has spoken at TED Global. He writes regular columns for the Spectator, Market Leader and Impact, and also occasional pieces for Wired.

Rory is married to a vicar and has twin daughters of 14. He lives in the former home of Napoleon III – unfortunately in the attic. He is a trustee of the Benjamin Franklin House in London and of Rochester Cathedral.

Eddie Copeland is an advocate of government and public sector organisations making smarter use of technology and data to deliver more and better with less. He is currently an Innovation Lab Director at Nesta, responsible for their work on data, behavioural insights, local government reform, the collaborative economy & digital democracy.

Previously he was Head of Technology Policy at Policy Exchange, one of the UK’s leading think tanks. He has worked across a number of sectors, including as Parliamentary Researcher to Sir Alan Haselhurst, MP; Congressional intern to Congressman Tom Petri and the Office of the Parliamentarians; Project Manager of global IT infrastructure projects at Accenture and Shell; Development Director of The Perse School, Cambridge; and founder of web start-up, Orier Digital.

Dr Robin Pharoah of Future Agenda (Anthropologist & Ethnographer)

Robin can be considered one of the early pioneers of the use of anthropological thought and ethnographic research for research and innovation in the UK. He has founded a multiple award winning research agency, worked across all sectors with multi-nationals, governments and the 3rd sector, and has recognised expertise in understanding Chinese culture and consumers, as well as working with ‘hard to reach’ populations locally and internationally to uncover new insights.

Robin has worked with numerous local authorities and public sector bodies tackling challenging community engagement issues including migration, community cohesion, isolation and troubled families. His most recent work in Southwark and Wigan has acheived national recognition and has led to system-wide changes in community engagement strategy.

Tiffany St James, Co-Founder of Transmute

Tiffany is the former Head of Public Participation for the UK Government, running web rationalisation programmes, Directgov and Digital Policy Communications and launched Data.gov.uk. She was the first Head of Social Media at Cabinet Office, joining up 32 central Government Departments.

She is a digital and social media strategist specialising in business transformation enabled through digital practice.

Co-Founder of Transmute, Tiffany helps large national and global businesses drive digital change within their organisations, making lasting change to their bottom line through practical digital and social media delivery embedded across all business units, with clients ranging from Google to the Abu Dhabi Government.

Tiffany is identified as one of the inaugural Tech City100, and Top 100 UK influencers of Digital Marketing in the UK 2015, by The Drum, Business Magazine of the Year and she is a TED Speaker.

Tiffany wants to help Britain become a digital powerhouse, nurturing talent through greater digital capability which she undertakes as an Executive Board Member of BIMA, Lecturer for Google’s We Are Squared Digital Marketing and Leadership Qualifications and Advisor to Google’s Digital Academy, Digital Trainer for Marketing Agencies Association and an Alumni of MITs Design and Development of Education Technology.

Allan Ross, Head of Communications at the Wales Office

Allan is Head of Communications at the Wales Office where he is responsible for re-shaping the UK Government’s communications across the country. Allan joined the Wales Office on secondment after leading the UK Government’s communications campaign for the Scottish Referendum. He has previously held senior communications roles at the Home Office and in Downing Street, where he was responsible for modernising the press office to use a full range of media channels and secure coverage for the Prime Minister’s visits and events. He also led on media relations for the 2012 Olympics and coordinated a change management project to improve the Government’s strategic communications on counter terrorism and privacy & security.

Amanda Rendle, Former Global Head of Marketing at HSBC

Amanda is the former Global Head of Marketing for Commercial Banking and Global Banking and Markets at HSBC. She has over 30 years of marketing experience in both Agencies and Clients across numerous sectors including: financial services, professional service and FMCG sectors. She began her career at Barclays Bank before moving to Limbo (Bartle Bogle Hegarty). She then went on to set up a consultancy practice recognising the opportunity to focus on customer experience. She joined HSBC in 2000.

Francis Ingham, PRCA Director General; ICCO Chief Executive

Francis Ingham is Director General of the PRCA, the largest PR professional body outside of the USA, operating in the UK, the Middle East and North Africa, and representing and regulating over 20,000 PR practitioners. He is also Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), the PR body which represents 2,5000 PR agencies via 34 national trade associations around the world.

He is External Examiner of the American University at Richmond; Master of the City of London Company of Public Relations Practitioners; and a Trustee of The Speakers’ Corner Trust. He was educated at Oxford University, where he read Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Prior to joining the PRCA in 2007, he worked at the CIPR as Assistant Director General and Head of Public Affairs. Before those roles, he worked for the CBI and the Conservative Party. Ingham has also been Vice Chairman of an NHS Trust; a London Councillor; and served on various Local Government Association Executives, including its Reputation Taskforce.

Phil Burgess, Joint Managing Director, C Space (EMEA)

Phil is Joint Managing Director of C Space, a consultancy which helps the world’s leading brands drive growth by harnessing the creativity and inspiration of their customers. Phil is a firm believer that the top organisations in their fields will get ahead by working collaboratively with their customers to innovate and solve business challenges. He’s passionate about using digital tools, online communities in particular, to help organisations better understand their customers’ needs and co-create better products and services. C Space has run more than 700 online communities for 250+ brands in 60+ countries, including Unilever, Twitter, Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung and Heinz.

More recently, Phil’s been translating this experience into the public sector, working with several London Borough Councils to engage and collaborate with residents online. Before joining C Space, Phil headed up the Consumer Research team at a boutique insight consultancy where he developed their online community proposition and pioneered innovative approaches to using social media to drive insight for clients across FMCG, Financial Services, Technology and the Public Sector.

Vaughn Armstrong, Director, Toast Design

Vaughn Armstrong is a career marketing and communications professional always working on the ‘outward facing’ side. He has always been looking for new approaches to marketing that break the mould in some significant way.

Having worked in senior marketing roles across the IT and Communications market, Vaughn came across the worlds of inbound marketing and marketing automation. He now leads Toast Inbound, the inbound marketing practice for the agency Toast Design, combining great content creation with market leading technology to support communications and marketing teams.

Vaughn is Inbound and HubSpot certified and Toast is a HubSpot Gold Partner.

Ian Farrow, Managing Director of Westco Trading Ltd

Ian has over 15 years working within politics, local government and the private sector providing strategic planning, campaign delivery, government relations and reputation management. An award-winning communications and marketing specialist with change management, public affairs and consultation experience, Ian has a wealth of experience in communication product development, corporate restructures and business growth and development.